ISSUE 68 • ANDROID ADVISOR 27motion controls, a whole new face unlock, a 90Hz
display, and an upgraded on-device Google Assistant.
All of which sounds great, and should be a recipe
for a phenomenal flagship. But none of those five big
changes is quite as good as it should be – and once
you throw in the frankly abysmal battery performance
the regular Pixel 4 becomes a very difficult phone to
recommend anyone actually buy.
Design
Google has chosen not to reinvent the wheel with
the Pixel 4, and it’s immediately identifiable as a
Pixel phone – even as a surprising number of smaller
touches have changed along the way.
There are the cutesy colour names – Clearly
White and Just Black, joined this year by Oh So
Orange, a vibrant finish that sits somewhere between
a peachy pink and the neon orange that the name
implies. The black model has a glossy rear, while
the orange and white models use frosted glass for a
slightly more matte effect.
As before, the power button offers a flash of
contrasting colour, but this time it sits against a
matte black aluminium border that runs round the
edge of the device and helps the colourful touches
pop that little bit more. The border is hard to notice
on the black model, but on the others it gives the
whole phone a chunky, almost toy-like aesthetic –
but in a way that works, and doesn’t feel as cheap
as that makes it sound.
The big change on the front is the move to drop
the notch entirely. The Pixel 3 used a big bezel while